Confession: I used to be a Pilates jerk

You may have seen my posts recently on Instagram and Facebook about an event I'm involved in called The Pilates Love Movement. Anula Maiberg, Jessica Valant, Lesley Logan and I are teaching a Facebook Live mat class on February 12 at 3:30pm to celebrate love, diversity, and acceptance in the Pilates world and beyond. Each one of us has a bit of a different reason why the event is particularly important to us and today I want to share mine. For me it's about putting an end to all of the cranky, hater-like behavior that happens in the Pilates world. Here's the hard part though. I used to be a cranky hater. I was trained classically and formed an opinion early on that all other forms of Pilates were rubbish. I believed there was no other way than classical Pilates and when I opened my own studio and started teaching teachers I passed my opinions and attitudes down to them. I never let my instructors teach outside of the classical method, EVER. Then years later I started to see that incredibly reputable and classically trained teachers were doing non-classical exercises. I started to think, "Oh my Gosh, Joseph Pilates might not strike me down dead from the heavens above if I teach something new" and so it began. Little by little I started getting inspired by the posts I was seeing. I started trying new exercises when I worked out and then, oh my goodness, I started teaching them. You know what happened? I didn't get struck down dead. I also started having a lot of fun and felt a bit more realxed. I even started to post videos of myself doing creative things. It was so great to get positive feedback from others for doing something that was pretty far out of my comfort zone. Then one day I posted a video of myself doing a variation of the mermaid on the reformer and I got bullied...by a grown-up. Seriously! It happened three more times before I finally put a stop to it by blocking her. The hardest thing to admit though is that I understood her anger. I used to be that person. Ok, maybe not to her extreme but I kinda knew how she felt and I was so more grateful that ever that I was a reformed Pilates jerk. Here's the bottom line though. Do you! Be classical, be contemporary, be whatever you want to be but be kind and consider the possibility that you may not know it all.

Please join Anula, Jessica, Lesley and I on February 12 at 3:30 eastern time for this extremely special event celebrating love, diversity and acceptance in the Pilates world and beyond. Each one of us teaches on our own page then you'll jump to the next girls page. Anula is at 3:30, I'm at 3:50, Lesley is at 4:10 and Jessica is at 4:30 followed by a Q&A session.